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Thursday 10 October 2024
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Coover, Robert
(1932-2024) US author who established a considerable reputation with his novels, in which Fabulation and political scatology mix fruitfully. His work could be seen to represent a Postmodernist intensification of the same milieu excoriated by Richard Condon; at times both authors seem to be describing a nightmare dream of orgy-choked life in the Late Roman Empire (see ...
Ross, Joseph
Working name of US teacher and editor Joseph Wrzos (1929-2023). He acted as Managing Editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic 1965-1967 while continuing to teach high-school English full-time in New Jersey. He edited The Best of Amazing (anth 1967), selecting only stories from before he became editor; and Hannes Bok: A Life in Illustration (graph coll 2012). His influence on the field has not been well ...
Gunther, John
(1901-1970) US author, best known for the memoir of the death of his child, Death, Be Not Proud (1948). Of some sf interest are Eden for One: An Amusement (1927; vt Peter Lancelot: An Amusement 1927), in which a mage from another Dimension gives young Peter the opportunity to create an Alternate World to thrive in, which he takes; and The Bright Nemesis (1932), a ...
Time Travel
It is a great literary convenience to be able to move a narrative viewpoint backwards or forwards in Time, and writers have always been prepared to use whatever narrative devices come to hand for this purpose. Until the end of the nineteenth century, dreams were the favoured method – perhaps most significantly deployed in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and Edgar Allan ...
Campion, Sarah
Pseudonym of UK-born teacher, journalist and author Mary Rose Coulton (1906-2002), author of Father: A Portrait of G G Coulton (1948), an impressive biography of her father George Gordon Coulton, the important scholar who also wrote Friar's Lantern (1906), a Timeslip tale. Her fourth novel, Thirty Million Gas Masks (1936), is a Near Future ...
Robinson, Roger
(1943- ) UK computer programmer, bibliographer and publisher, active in UK Fandom for many years. The Writings of Henry Kenneth Bulmer (1983 chap; rev 1984 chap) is an exhaustive Bibliography of one of the most prolific sf writers, Kenneth Bulmer, and Who's Hugh?: An SF Reader's Guide to Pseudonyms (1987) is similarly exhaustive in its ...